Case Study

Background

eHealth Queensland (eHQ) provides a range of ICT services to Queensland Health and other Queensland Government agencies. The Digital Service Centre (DSC) is Queensland’s largest ICT help desk and provides first line support to over 100,000 healthcare practitioners and administrators. Due to increased call volumes, average wait times for service at the DSC increased from the standard 2 minutes to over 11 minutes, reaching over an hour during peak periods.

Objectives

eHQ executives engaged the S3 Consult team to work with the DSC leadership team to deliver rapid improvements to customer services. Specifically, the project was initiated with the following objectives -

• Reduce call waiting time for priority callers (clinicians).
• Return overall performance for the DSC to target levels without impacting overall costs.
• Engage DSC staff to lead improvements and uplift staff engagement.

Project Approach

We engaged with a cross-section of DSC leadership and staff to identify the root causes behind the high call waiting times. This involved a series of workshops as well as actively listening to calls to identify customer experience and call process variations.

Our team rapidly identified the root causes for the problem and developed the following multi-pronged approach to meeting the project objectives -

• Simplify and standardise staff rostering processes and shift patterns to match customer demand
• Reduce the number of repeat callers by increasing fixed at first contact
• Reduce the need for calls by addressing root causes of recurring technical problems
• Introduce a clinical priority hotline for emergency/urgent calls and empower staff to actively manage the hotline
• Implement a staff engagement survey to highlight areas for improvement and develop action plans

Project Outcome

The project achieved the following outcomes –

• Reduction in average call waiting time from 11+ minutes to 1.16 minutes.
• Reduction in call waiting time for clinical emergencies to 30 seconds
• Standardisation of rosters to 3 shift patterns (reduced from 20+ shift patterns)
• Improvement in staff satisfaction and engagement
• Estimated productivity improvement for the organisation of $10M+ per annum due to reduced waiting times